Utility companies use utility usage meters to determine the amount of utilities consumed at a customer site. A periodic reading of the utility meter is necessary to determine the usage and to bill the customer for the amount used. The need to send utility company employees to customer site to read the meters is a costly and time consuming method of collecting such information. Thus, automated means of recording and reporting the utility usage at customer sites is rapidly replacing the manually-read utility meters.
An example of a utility reporting system is described in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,086,434 to Bocchi entitled "Remote Condition Reporting System." This prior art system records information on utility usage and periodically dials into a central office to report the utility usage for recording and billing purposes. The types of utilities described for this reporting system are water, power, gas and the like. This prior art system connects to the consumer's home telephone line to communicate to the central office using a tone generator to send information over the telephone lines.
This and other prior art systems have several fundamental shortcomings. When communicating on-line with the central office, the telephone subscriber cannot use the residential phone for dialing out. Although the prior art communication systems attempt their telephone connections in the middle of the night, this is a serious shortcoming if the need arises to dial an emergency number such as 911. In addition, many of the prior art utility monitors operate using modems to communicate information between 300 and 2,400 baud or more. These modem-driven utility reporting communication systems fail in many rural environments due to noisy lines, interruption by call-waiting signals and the like. In addition, prior art utility reporting communication systems suffer from a variety of data errors in transmitting the information. The prior art is also lacking in providing Timed Off-peak Usage (TOU) power metering in combination with a utility meter reader and communication system.